American History: A Survey (Brinkley), 13th Edition

Where Historians Disagree - Women's History

The rise of women's history in recent decades has produced many debates among historians. But its most important impact has been to challenge scholars to look at the past through a new lens. Historians had long been accustomed to considering the influence of ideas, of economic interests, and of race and ethnicity on the course of history. Women's history challenged them to consider as well the role of gender. Throughout history, many scholars now argue, societies have created distinctive roles for men and women. How those roles have been defined, and the ways in which the roles affect how people and cultures behave, should be central to our understanding of both the past and the present.

Women's history was not new to the 1960s. Just as women had been challenging traditional gender roles long before the 1960s, so too have women (and some men) been writing women's history for many years. In the nineteenth century, such scholarship generally stressed the unrecognized contributions of women to history—for example, Sarah Hale's 1853 Record of All Distinguished Women from "the Beginning" till A.D. 1850. Work of the same sort continued into the twentieth century and, indeed, continues today.

But after 1900, people committed to progressive reform movements began to produce a different kind of women's scholarship, in many ways more sociological than historical. It revealed, above all, ways in which women were victimized by a harsh new system of industrialism. In the process, it attempted to raise popular support for reform. Feminist scholars such as Edith Abbott, Margaret Byington, and Katherine Anthony examined the impact of economic change on working-class families, with a special focus on women; and they looked at the often terrible conditions in which women worked in factories, mills, and other people's homes. Their goal was less to celebrate women's contributions than to direct attention to the oppression of women by a harsh capitalist system and arouse sentiment for reform.

Feminism receded from prominence after the victory of the suffrage movement in 1920, and women's history entered a half-century of relative inactivity as well. Women continued to write important histories in many fields, and some—for example, Eleanor Flexner, whose Century of Struggle (1959) became a classic history of the suffrage crusade—wrote explicitly about women. Mary Beard, best known for her sweeping historical narratives written in collaboration with her husband, Charles Beard, published a book of her own in 1964, Women as a Force in History, in which she argued for the historical importance of ordinary women as shapers of society. But such work at first had little impact on the writing of history as a whole.

As modern feminism began to sweep across society in the 1960s and 1970s, interest in women's history revived as well. Gerda Lerner, one of the pioneers of the new women's history, once wrote of the impact of feminism on historical studies: "The recognition that we had been denied our history came to many of us as a staggering insight, which altered our consciousness irretrievably." For a time, the new women's history repeated the pattern of earlier studies of women. Much of the early work was in the "contributionist" tradition, stressing the way in which women had played more notable roles in major historical events than men had usually acknowledged. Other work stressed ways in which women had been victimized by their subordination to men and by their powerlessness within the industrial economy.

Increasingly, however, women's history began to question the nature of gender itself. Some scholars began to emphasize the artificiality of gender distinctions. The difference between women and men, they argued, was socially constructed. It was also superficial and (in the public world, at least) unimportant. The history of women was, therefore, the history of how men (with the unwitting help of many women) had created and maintained a set of fictions about women's capacities that modern women were now attempting to shatter.

By the early 1980s, some feminists had begun to make a very different argument: that there were basic differences between women and men—not just biological differences, but differences in values, sensibilities, and culture. This, of course, was what most men and many women had believed for decades (indeed centuries) before the feminist revolution. But the feminists of the 1970s and 1980s did not see these differences as evidence of women's incapacities. They saw them, rather, as evidence of an alternative female culture capable of challenging (and improving) the male-dominated world. Some historians of women, therefore, began exploring areas of female experience that revealed the special character of women's culture and values: family, housework, motherhood, women's clubs and organizations, female literature, the social lives of working-class women, women's sexuality, and many other subjects that suggested "difference" more than "contributions" or "victimization." Partly in response, some historians began to make the same argument about men—that understanding "masculinity" and its role in shaping men's lives was as important as understanding notions of "femininity" in explaining the history of women.

The notion of gender as a source of social and cultural difference was responsible for the most powerful challenge women's history has raised to the way in which scholars view the past. It is not enough simply to expand the existing story to make room for women, Joan Scott, one of the most influential theorists of gender studies, has written. Feminist history is, rather, a way of reconceptualizing the past by accepting that notions of gender have been a central force in the lives of societies.

Many historians continue to believe that other categories (race and class in particular) have in fact been more important in shaping the lives of men and women than has gender. But even those who do so are increasingly willing to accept the argument of women's historians: that understanding concepts of gender is an essential part of understanding women's (and men's) lives.

http://www.anb.org/cush_wlabor.html - "Women in the Labor Force," Jeanne Boydston

http://www.kevincmurphy.com/cott.html - "Summary of Nancy Cott's Grounding of Modern Feminism," Kevin Murphy

1			Among the leading historians of women and gender today are Jeanne Boydston and Nancy Cott. Read the article and review above. What arguments do these respective articles and books make? Are these arguments women's history, gender history, or both?

http://www.kevincmurphy.com/chauncey.html - "Summary of George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940," Kevin Murphy

http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/GayNY.html - Gay New York, CUNY

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0308/features/index.shtml - "Moment of Decision," Rick Perlstein

http://www.chicagomaroon.com/online_edition/article/6398 - "Chauncey outlines work in gay history," Kenneth Aliaga

2			The recent accomplishments of gender history have not centered on women alone. One of the most original and influential works in the field lately is George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Read the articles and interviews above and summarize Chauncey's central arguments. How is Gay New York a work of gender history? How does it build on the work of previous historians of women and gender?